If this is so, we can easily understand how it comes about that the
speech of Aeneas contains lines which are unquestionably grand and free
from any suspicion of bombast, and others which, though not free from
that suspicion, are nevertheless highly poetic. To the first class
certainly belongs the passage beginning, 'But as we often see.' To the
second belongs the description of Pyrrhus, covered with blood that was
Baked and impasted with the parching streets,
That lend a tyrannous and damned light
To their lord's murder;
and again the picture of Pyrrhus standing like a tyrant in a picture,
with his uplifted arm arrested in act to strike by the crash of the
falling towers of Ilium. It is surely impossible to say that these lines
are _merely_ absurd and not in the least grand; and with them I should
join the passage about Fortune's wheel, and the concluding lines.
But how can the insertion of these passages possibly be explained on the
hypothesis that Shakespeare meant the speech to be ridiculous?
3. 'Still,' it may be answered, 'Shakespeare _must_ have been conscious
of the bombast in some of these passages. How could he help seeing it?
And, if he saw it, he cannot have meant seriously to praise the speech.'
But why must he have seen it? Did Marlowe know when he wrote
bombastically? Or Marston? Or Heywood? Does not Shakespeare elsewhere
write bombast? The truth is that the two defects of style in the speech
are the very defects we do find in his writings.
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